Oren Helbok, Part 2, Train world, The Exchange Gallery and social goodness

In the second half of my conversation with Oren, he talks about becoming the Executive Director of a new gallery, his photographic work and heritage and the social imperative behind all of his work. Enjoy.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome to Locals, the podcast in which we talk to people who are, well, local. Today we have the second part of a conversation with Orin Hellbach, photographer, trained enthusiast, and executive director of the Exchange Gallery right there on Main Street. Last week we heard about Orin's not so misbegotten youth in the Bronx, his year in a van traveling across the country and stopping in Montana to wrestle calves. We heard about his woodworking, his time at Greenwood Friend School, and the birth and fiery demise of the Moose Exchange. And that's only half of Orin's story. Today we'll pick up with what followed the fire at the Moose Exchange. Here we go. So when last we left our hero, he was talking about the Exchange Gallery on Main Street in Bloomsburg and how it began. Let's take it from there, what the Exchange Gallery is, what your work in the gallery is.

SPEAKER_00 1:01

I think it's important for people to understand where the name came from, because the name is really central to the whole ethos of this organization. Back in the fall of 2009, we had not yet moved into the Moose Building on West Main Street. There were a group of people who were interested in making something out of it and figuring out how we could use that building. One of those people was Doug Michael, who had already started Columbia County Bread and Granola. He wanted to use the kitchen in the Moose Building. So there was a day in the fall of 09 we went up to Carbondale because their Chamber of Commerce helped build an incubator space that includes a community kitchen. And we went to see how this worked, what it did. Is it something that we could replicate here? After that tour, we sat at a restaurant on Main Street in Carbondale thinking about this project and what it was, and the idea of what we call this place. What is this building? What's the name that we put on it? I had gotten as far as thinking of a union, like a student union, and I like the idea of unions. So my suggestion was moose union. And everyone said, that sounds like mating moose. We're not naming this place after mating moose. And it was Doug who said, Well, what about exchange? A place where people come together to share. And yes, that was it. So Moose Exchange it became. When we were no longer in that building and moved into this space, the moose part of who we were was no longer who we are. The exchange is absolutely who we are. This is a place where people come to share their ideas, their experiences.

SPEAKER_01 2:37

In terms of the moose, the name, the moose exchange, especially, I just want to give a shout out to Drew because that began with Drew McGee. And Drew's a such a quiet philanthropist, and probably wouldn't want me even say this. I don't know. But she does so much good, and you just never know it. So I I love I'm fine with it being no longer the moose. That was not her name originally, but she didn't put McGee on it. You know, she just funds and helps bring things about. So the exchange, its origins were back with Drew pre-building.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

And I would go back a couple of generations farther.

SPEAKER_01 3:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Her grandfather, Harry McGee, who ran the mill, the McGee carpet company, the largest employer in the region. Harry had a real sense of community, doing things for this community. He liked to put his name on everything. There's no question about that. It was the McGee Transportation Museum. And even the trash cans at the mill were stamped with McGee. Yeah. But there were two museums here. The Transportation Museum was out on Millville Road and just past Fishing Creek in that big field there. Harry had a group of employees, Harry's rats, who, when he had ideas, he could say, Okay, boys, let's build it. So he said, Let's lay 3,000 feet of trolley track. And they did.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

It was there just in the first years I got here, and then I think the flood had taken it out.

SPEAKER_00 4:08

Agnes in 72 wiped the the a lot of that stuff that wasn't washed away was ruined. Harry died that November. Agnes was June. Harry died in November. Harry's children were just as interested in this community, just as dedicated to it, were not interested in history. So they looked ahead. Jimmy McGee, who ended up running the mill, when the family ended up selling the mill, the giant smokestack down there, under that paint, it says McGee Carpet Company in white brick set into the red brick. When it was no longer theirs, he said, we need to cover that. It's not ours anymore. He had a very different attitude about the past and his family's connection to this community than Harry had. Drew, of course, you know, grandchildren are often more like their grandparents than their parents. Drew had a real sense for history. The reason that the moose building ended up hers at all was simply because she loved it. She had been to all kinds of events there as a kid. When the moose itself, when the moose club moved out of that building, she bought it because she loved it. She operated it for a few years as the blue moose. Instead of being the bloom moose, it was the blue moose. So it was a club, there's a liquor license, they did events. Things in Drew's life changed. So for a few years after the Blue Moose closed, she rented it to a little evangelical church. And everyone, largely including her, sort of forgot about it. But in 2009, when that church told Drew, we're going to move out into our own space that fits us better, she started thinking, what do we do with this building? And most importantly, how can this building be an asset for this town? And that was the start of the entire project that we're now sitting, we're sitting in a much smaller space, but it is still Drew's dream that got us here.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

You know, and I had a great conversation with Justin, Drew's son, who's our mayor currently and running for state legislature. And uh he talked about that and that his grandparents, Jim and Audrey, they'd sort of the name had been put on enough, and that they were not interested in seeing the name. And you sort of see both the legacy of Harry that you mentioned, and the legacy of Jim and Audrey in Drew of not needing a name on it, but still doing the good work. So BTE, the exchange, so many things in this community have come from the philanthropic heart of that family. I just always want to give a shout out to them because it should be remembered.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

It's hugely important that we understand where we came from and who the people were who helped get us here. We have a town park in Bloomsburg because Harry and his friends made sure that it happened. We have an airport because Harry and his friends made sure that that happened. There were particular human beings at a particular time who made choices that have shaped the community that we're in now. One of the lessons we need to take from that is that we now need to be making choices that shape the community that our children and grandchildren are in. So that's that is part of the storytelling that we're doing, that you're doing by collecting these stories, is helping people get that idea in our head. Oh, yeah, you know, not only we got here because of them, but our grandchildren can get somewhere because of us. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

The podcast is also about so many different communities and connections within the community that you would work with Drew, Justin, whose father and grandfather and grandmother supported BTE and grew that, whose paternal grandfather and grandmother are why this space exists, that it came from the Hummels, Justin's other grandparents. So it's such a tightly connected community here. And I often think if there was a graphic of the podcast, it would be an ever-changing, multicolored, three-dimensional web of space and experience and time and community relationships and social relationships and familial relationships. So yeah, it's a small, fascinating community in that way. And so, in here, not only do you have the art, but you also have that listening room. Uh, you and BJ, and BJ's your sound person. I'm gonna also give a shout-out to BJ. So, talk about the listening room.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

That grew out of the Destination Blues music festivals that we did starting in 2014. Chris Young, who was a longtime county commissioner here, he tells the story of one day, one Sunday morning he was driving. This this goes back decades. He's driving around the county, you know, doing his usual rounds, and he turns on the radio and he comes upon WQSU out of Sealinsgrove, Susquehanna University, and there's Good Time Charlie playing the blues. And Chris, his experience of the blues was very limited, but that morning he said it was like his Paul on the road to Damascus moment, this music just grabbed him, and he became a huge blues fan. Fast forward, again, years, there's now this big building, the Moose Building, that Chris is involved with. The commissioners are in charge of the county hotel tax funds. So every year, all the hotels in Columbia County are paying a small portion of their income into a fund that is supposed to go towards increasing tourism in the county. The hotel owners are also telling Chris, oh, in the winters, you know, things here are really dead. So Chris gets this idea, we need something to bring people into this county in the wintertime. Let's do a blues festival. So he approaches me and Adrian Male, who at the time was the downtown manager, also on the exchange board, and he says, Hey kids, let's put on a blues festival. And we're like, huh, okay. At the time, there were two established blues festivals in this region: Briggs Farm over in Nescarpec and the Billtown Blues, run by the Billtown Blues Association, a nonprofit in Williamsport. So Adrian and I, who knew nothing about any of this, we approached the people who ran those festivals to say, can you help us do something here? And Bonnie Tallman from Billtown and Richard Briggs from Briggs Farm were extremely generous with their time, their effort, their energy, their connections. And we started the festival in 2014, just after the fire in the building. That lasted five years. There are a whole set of complications in why the festival doesn't happen anymore. The shortest explanation is we just never got the outside people coming in and filling those hotel rooms. But halfway through the festival, Richard suggested we do a listening room, a small, intimate venue where people come for a concert, not like going to a bar. There aren't televisions on, there aren't people talking. This is about the experience of the musicians and the audience. We had what turned out to be the perfect space for it. This gallery space is just the right size. The acoustics in here are very good. We started in the summer of 2017, Richard doing the booking. Over time, Richard stepped back, BJ stepped in. BJ knows everybody. He does. And there are a lot of blues musicians, even with relatively big reputations, who are perfectly happy to come into a small space like this and for next to nothing play a concert because they know they have everybody's full attention. It's a very special experience here. I describe it as a concert in our living room every month. And we have had just the most magical experiences here in this space with a tiny audience. The largest audience we ever had was when Vanessa Collier played here in, I think it was maybe 2018. She's relatively big. She's a saxophone player, she's a songwriter, she's a guitar player, she's fantastic, she's been around the world. She came here and played. There were 60 people here. It was actually just a week ago. Brett Alexander came to play. Brett Alexander and his friends, the Badleys, almost made it really big back in the 90s. Brett's been in this region ever since. He plays out, he is more of a record producer now than a performer. One of the world's great guys. And he has played the listening room on a number of occasions, always with other people. He made his solo debut last week here with 20 people in the audience. Teeny tiny crowd. A teeny tiny appreciative, enthusiastic crowd. And Brett left happy. He doesn't need to play for an arena, he needs to play for people who care. And the people who come here care. It really is the best concert experience I've ever had, and I get to have it here every month. An enormous privilege.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

That's great. Bill J, your sound person, is amazing. And BJ became my sound person when I was touring, and so went on a seven tour, seven country tour of Africa with me. And Richard Briggs and Allison were there. And so they made that connection that ended up working with BJ on the Blues Festival that connected BJ to you. BJ is amazing. He was a rock and roll roadie for Teach and Chong, moved to Bloomsburg with his wife Robin, and was a worked for the gas company, was a heating contractor. Again, was my sound person and lighting person. He runs the ran the festival sound for a while and does this, and is just an amazing person. Unfortunately, he will not sit in front of a microphone, which is a true shame. Well, talk now also about your art, because we talked about your wood working as art in our last episode, but you also are a photographer specifically of trains. Want to talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 13:45

Sure. So when I was a very small boy, before I could talk, we lived in the Bronx. My parents and I lived at the highest point in New York City, a mile from the railroad tracks down by the Hudson River. They would take me down and we'd sit on the station platform at Riverdale Station or Spyton Divel Station in the Bronx to have picnic suppers. My parents were looking out at the river. I mean, it's absolutely spectacular that the palisades across the way, we're near the largest city in North America and the Grand Canyon at the same time. It really is beautiful. I, however, was looking the other direction and watching the trains go by. And my father very quickly recognized what passion I had for these trains. He had been an airplane guy. He grew up in the South Bronx in a lower class family, but his mother let him keep a few of the dollars that he made at the ANP to take flying lessons at Peterborough Airport, New Jersey. And in 1955, at age 18, he got his private pilot's license. Never flew after that because he couldn't afford it, but planes were his first love. Nonetheless, when I came around and I was just crazy about trains, he jumped in and became a huge rail fan. Started buying books of railroad photography, subscribed to Trains Magazine. By the time I was three years old, we were getting up at 4 o'clock in the morning to go drive across New Jersey and Pennsylvania to go chase steam trains. He was also a very, very good amateur photographer. He had bought himself a set of a 35 millimeter camera and some lenses before I was born. He quickly turned that when we were interested in trains into photographing the trains and from the very outset was doing really world-class work. He was not ambitious about getting stuff published. He's only had a handful of photographs published. But one of the things that I learned from him, one of the most important things in my life, if you want to make friends with a railroad, you take a picture of him with his train and then you hand him a print. And after that, you're his friend and you've got access. Oh, come on in, come on up. The number of people who have given me rides in their locomotives because my father has given them photographs is uncountable at this point. He was walking, talking goodwill. Wherever he went, he'd stick out his hand. John Hellbach from New York, you know, you've got an interesting, it could be a train, it could be a factory, it could be the Staten Island Ferry. He got us access because he was interested in what people did, treated them with respect, and we had the most remarkable experiences throughout my childhood into my adulthood. Learning from him about how to take a picture, learning from him about how to talk to somebody, that opened up all of Train World to me. So throughout my youth, we spent time at a lot of different railroads up and down the East Coast. My father volunteered a little bit as a brakeman. I would spend the day riding the locomotive cab with the engineer or sitting in the caboose. We spent three months, a month each of three summers in Virginia on a tourist railroad, a steam railroad. My father was firing the locomotive, shoveling coal in. I was sitting on the fireman's seat, running the injector, putting water in the boiler. So all of these, all of these experiences that my father made possible for me are really the foundation of a good portion of my life now. The photography was something also that he, in some ways, my father didn't really teach me. He handed me the camera so I could use it. He never directed me, this is what you need to do. He showed me how to make prints in a dark room. That was stuff I learned directly. The compositional aspects of it, even my father doesn't fully understand why he makes photographs the way he does. He feels them, he doesn't think about them. I asked him a few years ago, how do you construct a photograph? Why do you decide to aim your camera the way you do? And he said, I like what my eyes like. Okay. Duke Ellington, if it sounds good, it is good. Exactly. Exactly. And by providing me with all of these other examples, these books and magazines with photographs by the great American railroad photographers throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, I just had all these examples in front of me. And I feel it. I don't generally think about what I'm doing. I look through the viewfinder and yeah, that looks right. At this point, I've made probably at least a quarter million exposures, and maybe north of L.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

A quarter of a million.

SPEAKER_00 18:11

Well, in the old days when it was film, it was very, very few. I'm sure, yeah. With digital, pixels are effectively free. Like so many other things in the world, one gets better as a photographer simply by doing it. You know, the first 10,000 don't count. We do it over and over and over again. I'm also extremely fortunate now. My friend group within Train World keeps growing. I'm 60 years old and I keep making new friends, which is not what I would have expected the way a life would work. Train World and specifically the railroad photographers, it's a really interesting group of people who are much better connected now because of the internet than ever before. In the old days, my father and I, we certainly knew other people, but we were largely off on our own. Now, I know everybody. I see them on Facebook. I just came back last week from two weeks on the road with a good friend in Train World. We went to the Center for Railroad Photography and Art Conference in Indianapolis this year. The center is actually based in Madison, Wisconsin. They have collected at this point close to a million negatives, a million images by some of the greatest railroad photographers in 20th century America. And they're also collecting some historic photographs, they're collecting some paintings and other fine art. The conferences have been going on for 25 years. I started going in 2016, immediately regretted not going to the earlier ones. John Gruber, who was a Midwestern photographer and a journalist, had an idea that there needed to be some place that was devoted to American railroad photography. That is the center now. They've got almost a dozen employees. They are putting a lot of these photographs online. They're scanning them, making them available on the internet. They do exhibitions that travel around the country to other venues. The conferences from the very beginning were called Conversations. That's the name of the conference. Every year there was conversations. And it was the perfect name because people get together, the presentations that are done are great. The conversations that we have in between and at supper are even better. Some of the greatest railroad photographers who live in America now, Ted Benson from California, comes to these conferences. I've seen his photographs my whole life. I've gotten to shake his hand, I've gotten to talk to him about what he does. All of these people get together. It is so inspiring to be with these established photographers. Also, though, the internet has made it possible for all these young kids. Railroad photographers, railroad fans in general, tend to be a little odd. We come from somewhere down at the end of the spectrum. And in the old days, a lot of kids would have sat at home thinking nobody else likes trains. And now through the internet they realize, oh, there are all these other people just like me who love this stuff. The number of kids who are coming out to chase these trains and photograph them larger than ever before. I think it is just joyful to see these crowds of people surrounding these trains. And some of them are excellent photographers. And I'm getting to meet them at trackside. We show each other on the back of our camera what we're doing during the day. We keep in touch through the internet. And as much as I get to mentor these kids, they're inspiring me. There is such creativity out there. All these new ideas. There are a few photographs of mine where I can specifically say I would not have done that except I'd known him and known the way that he thinks about the way a photograph is made.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

Now, also the way they are made, you were explaining this to me once. Kayaking with Ronds. And you're talking about how you would set up for a railroad crossing and you would plan everything out, and then when the train passed, you'd kick ass down to the next crossing. Is that how it goes?

SPEAKER_00 22:13

Right. So chasing a train is literally that. We set up in a location, make a photograph, and then jump in the car to get ahead of the train to get the next photograph. In this region, actually, I would say nationally, if not worldwide, the best show in steam railroading is what the Reading and Northern is putting on. They have a huge locomotive, it's the loudest steam locomotive I've ever heard. And they run regularly from Reading, Pennsylvania to Jim Thorpenback over the course of a day. It's about a 120-mile round trip. They have a smaller locomotive that they have also run on that route. I've probably done that at least 20 times. So I know the locations. There are always new things to find. In any given location, there's always some new angle. So it's always exciting to show up and try to figure out okay, what's the new thing to do here? I've done this enough, and it's enough of a show, enough other photographers come. When this locomotive runs, I will generally rent a van and fill it with my friends so we can chase together. And I am happy to be the guide and the driver while these folks, some of whom have never seen this locomotive, are getting the experience for the first time. There are a couple of places along this route where the road and the track are right next to each other. So I can drive alongside this locomotive, and my friends can stick their heads out the window and make their photographs of this moving, shouting locomotive. It is just exhilarating. Again, the loudest locomotive I've ever heard. And to be 20 feet from it and be able to capture that on film or video is nothing like it. Wow. Have you ever done a show with your father's work and your work in the same show here? We've never done it on the walls. My father, there have been a handful of his photographs that have been here in the gallery. At the center's conference in 2019, at Conversations 2019, I did a presentation for the group called Two Viewfinders, One Point of View. And it was my father's photographs and mine. I made the point that if at the end of the presentation you didn't remember whose were whose, that was fine. The idea was we had had these experiences together, and he had opened up the world to me. These were the photographs of his that there were many of them that really mean something deeply to me, the photographs I grew up with. And you can see with mine alongside his how I came to be the photographer I am. Well, where it's available online. Oh, I was gonna ask now, where could people find these images? If you go to where steamlives.net, that's my website. It's I'm a little behind. There's a lot more stuff that should be on it. But there is a John Hillbach page and there's an About Me page, and from there there are links to the YouTube video of that presentation that I made. There are also links to a couple of SoundCloud recordings of interviews that I've done with Erica Funkey at WVIA talking about the photography. And then also links to my Facebook pages. So you can find me by name as Orin B. Hellbach, and then also Orin B. Hellbach Photography. And I'm on Instagram as Where Steam Lives.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

Well, the last thing I'd like to try to cover is I know you are a social activist, and by that I don't mean like a Republican or Democrat. I mean somebody who has a strong desire, as seen in action, to do things that are socially oriented, to grow communities, to bind communities together, to further communities. Could you talk about where that comes from in you and where that is seen in the organizations you have both helped to found and run?

SPEAKER_00 26:05

I think where it came from originally is I grew up in New York City, and my parents were really interested in the world. So from the time I was very small, they were helping me be aware of a lot of what was happening in the world. My mother's family were all Russian Jews, came here around the turn of the 20th century, and the religion fell away. But to me, the most important aspect of Judaism is the dedication to making a better world. At Passover in our family, we do a satyr that is in, you know, in some nominal way sort of religious. But the idea of Passover is that we are dedicating ourselves to freedom everywhere. Passover celebrates the freedoms of the Jews escaping Egypt, but at a satyr every year we dedicate ourselves to doing the work so that all people can be free. That is central to who I am, how I think of myself. I am a Jew because of that obligation to do the work. In a town like Bloomsburg, there are all sorts of opportunities to help make this a better place. Some of them are overtly political. You will find me at rallies on Main Street. The work that we do here at The Exchange is doing that every day. People are intrinsically artistic and musical. We've been making marks on cave walls for tens of thousands of years. We sing in the shower. Any opportunity to do that makes us happier. We're social creatures. We do things in groups. So the opportunity to make art, to show art, to sing, to do that in a group is hugely important. And the the exchange makes those opportunities happen for people. Many of the people who show in this gallery have never shown anywhere else. They're still hesitant about thinking of themselves as artists. You put your work on the wall in a gallery, you're an artist. Obviously, you don't have to have it in a gallery. You can be an artist without that, but it is hugely affirming to see your work next to other people's. It makes for a stronger, better community when more people in it are happy. The exchange helps that by giving people an opportunity to show work, to come in, share an experience with music, to share their stories, just the same way you're doing it with these podcasts.

SPEAKER_01 28:39

Any activity in which politics is disinvited and conversation is fostered, it just gels us the hell out and lets us make decisions that are from a calmer, more rested brain, and so more creativity is allowed, more options are presented. So I think this is I think you're doing God's work here. I would like to agree with you. Thank you. And that's it for this week's locals, where we talk to people who are, well, local. Join us next week for a conversation that is very near to me. So near, in fact, it is about something inside of me. Lisa Mitchell and I will be talking about being in the club no one wants to be a member of.